After decades of witnessing disarray in America\u2019s Finest City, locals might wonder if there is an ancient curse that warns, \u201cMay you wake up in the morning to discover you are mayor of San Diego.\u201d In his sixth year in office, Todd Gloria likely knows the feeling.<\/p>\n
Of the seven mayors prior to Gloria, three resigned in scandal or crisis and four never won another election. Six years ago, fresh from successful tenures on the City Council and the state Assembly, and with a double-digit mayoral win under his belt, Gloria seemed likely to break the mayoral curse. With unprecedented bipartisan support, Gloria was uniquely positioned to build a citywide coalition and provide San Diego with the visionary \u2014 and charismatic \u2014 leadership needed to govern a 21st-century global metropolis. And after being mayor? Statewide or even national office beckoned.<\/p>\n
And then it wasn\u2019t so.<\/p>\n
Gloria initially seemed to have a winning formula: lead with a big issue \u2014 climate action, reducing downtown homelessness, a massive investment in mass transit \u2014 then whip up citywide support and push the policies through a Democrat-dominated City Council. Rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n
Yet even his early victories proved politically hollow. Gloria\u2019s Climate Action Plan received national attention, yet, along with his mass transit plans, was attacked from the left for doing too little and the right for doing anything at all. His policies on homelessness and affordable housing also faced gripes from those across the political spectrum. Indeed, that has been the signature of Gloria\u2019s tenure. He produces policies that can unite San Diegans, but mostly in opposition to him.<\/p>\n
Nowhere has that been clearer than with the city\u2019s budget deficit. To be fair, Gloria inherited a COVID-exacerbated structural budget problem from his predecessor. From 2021 to 2024, Gloria did an admirable job using one-time monies to take the city through the crisis. By 2025, the city was positioned to meaningfully close its budget deficit with revenue up 30% since 2021. But under Gloria, spending went up almost 40% during that period, with much of the cost coming from expansions in city employment and personnel costs.<\/p>\n
Efforts to increase revenue proved unpopular \u2014 witness the backlash over trash fees and Gloria\u2019s failure to win passage of a city sales tax hike in 2024. And then came the assault on Balboa Park, the region\u2019s premier egalitarian public space. Paying for park parking might have made sense on a budget analyst\u2019s spreadsheet. But politically, it bordered on the punitive and petulant. \u201cYou didn\u2019t vote for my sales tax so I\u2019m taking away your free picnic.\u201d So too with gutting arts and museum funding and closing Mission Bay bathrooms \u2014 then backing down. These actions were almost by design guaranteed to raise maximum public ire. And guaranteed to force a political retreat.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the second signature of the Gloria administration: When the going gets tough, Gloria backs down, a lesson not lost on his political opponents and rivals.<\/p>\n
As for what comes next for Todd Gloria, political history does not bode well. The last San Diego mayor to go on to higher office was Pete Wilson more than 40 years ago. But the race to replace Gloria might also offer him a political life preserver. His ally, Rep. Scott Peters, is expressing real interest in a 2028 mayoral run. It is not difficult to imagine a San Diego two-step here, with Peters coming home to City Hall and Gloria running to take Peters\u2019 50th district seat.<\/p>\n
Yet Gloria still has time to escape the mayoral curse. His greatest asset as a politician has always been his ability to connect across communities from the grassroots up, offering not just a vision of better things but the enthusiasm and hope to believe better things are both possible and doable. Reportedly, the mayor\u2019s staff has been keeping him in the bunker of City Hall, like so many of his predecessors in times of crisis, confronting the rest of San Diego in us-versus-them terms.<\/p>\n
The first step to a Gloria comeback, therefore, has to be his escaping his own staff and getting back out to the people, community event by community event, and doing two things. First, give the biggest mea culpa in local mayoral history. Second? Reignite the old Gloria optimism that just because one set of policies hasn\u2019t worked doesn\u2019t mean you give up. You come together to try something better.<\/p>\n
Will that be enough to save Gloria\u2019s mayorship? Maybe not. But it would be the legacy of a mayor who goes down fighting.<\/p>\n
Luna is professor emeritus of political science at San Diego Mesa College and director of the University of San Diego\u2019s Institute for Civil Civic Engagement.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After decades of witnessing disarray in America\u2019s Finest City, locals might wonder if there is an ancient curse…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1000297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,11890,1269,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1000296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-america","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-commentary","tag-opinion","tag-san-diego","tag-sandiego","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117094052483480450","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1000297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}